As part of providing water and sewage services to  two million people and nearly 60,000 businesses across Melbourne, Yarra Valley Water manages $5 billion worth of critical infrastructure assets. When its legacy drawing management system was no longer able to keep up with the demands of working with native CAD files, the water provider embarked on a digital transformation of the management of its  as-built drawings and specifications.

Yarra Valley Water now uses RedEye as its single source of truth for all asset-related drawings, documents, media. Staff and contractors now have quick and easy access to key asset data, and the platform is helping to facilitate procedural and cultural change throughout the business.

• Centralising asset drawings and data can free up expert resources and reduce search time for engineering drawings across an organisation.
  
  

• System-based workflows depersonalise the drafting process so that the most effective methods of working can be applied, enforced and duplicated at scale.

• Standardising drawings for like assets can generate substantial cost savings in design work and improve operational efficiencies.

“If we get the design right the first time, we’re going to save a lot of projects and adjustments going forward. We’re using RedEye as part of our toolkit to improve the quality of what we’re checking, and what we’re designing."

Kenneth Thompson
Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water

Yarra Valley Water is the largest of three Victorian Government owned retail water corporations. It provides drinking water and sewerage services to more than two million people and nearly 60,000 businesses across Melbourne.

The water provider’s service area covers 4,000 square kilometres. It manages $5 billion worth of critical infrastructure and assets, including 20,000 kilometres of water and sewer mains, about 100 water pump stations, 10 major treatment plans, and many small assets.

Historically, Yarra Valley Water’s in-house design team completed the majority of drafting and design work. The organisation then moved to an outsourced design process and adjusted its business processes accordingly.

Yarra Valley Water’s legacy drawing management system could not keep up with the advancements in CAD technologies within the native files its contractors provided, so it mostly stored and used PDFs. Employees would then upload, manage and distribute copies of PDFs, resulting in the loss of many native files on individual hard drives across the company.

The water provider identified multiple risks with this process, particularly the long-term financial impact to their future projects as they would essentially be “doubling up” on drafting costs to have PDFs redrafted to CAD files a second time upon starting new projects. 

This approach was also problematic because it posed security and compliance risks - and finding up-to-date drawings was difficult for everyone who needed to use them.

As Yarra Valley Water transitioned from using PDFs to CAD files, it required a new platform that could work with native files - and a variety of file formats, while continuing to remain relevant as engineering technologies and industry standards evolved. 

Yarra Valley Water chose RedEye to become the single source of truth for its engineering drawings and data. The focus of the initial implementation project was to improve electrical compliance, with a view to extending RedEye to other use cases across the business.

A dedicated project team and input from Yarra Valley Water’s key stakeholders resulted in a successful implementation, which began with over 400,000 drawings. About 5% were eliminated through the deduplication process.

Now more than one third of the organisation use RedEye, with a combined 7,000 document searches and 300 document markups every month.

“We’re using RedEye to change the processes in the business, which will drive better quality from our suppliers. Our electrical quality on projects is noticeably better than what it was two or three years ago.”

Kenneth Thompson, 
Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water

One of the immediate benefits RedEye delivered was the ease and speed of finding engineering drawings. Enhanced metadata about each drawing and the flexible keyword search feature ensures that head office, field crews and contractors can all locate drawings quickly via their desktops or the RedEye mobile app.

Yarra Valley Water reports that search time for key asset data and documents has been reduced from hours to just a few clicks.

RedEye has also helped to decentralise information from a single department, so that staff from any department can contribute to the management of key asset data. 

“We know there are potential savings of at least $2,500,000 in design work alone.”

Having RedEye in place has also helped Yarra Valley Water transfer control of the intellectual property of its drawings back from contractors, while also improving the quality of the outputs supplied by contractors.

“Prior to using RedEye, we didn’t have a drawing standard, or a document that outlined how we expected to receive drawings from our contractors. It was often left to the end of the project for us to request accurate up-to-date, as-built drawings - and they were typically much harder to get at the end of the project,” said Mr Thompson.

“Now, we have a drawing standard which is published on our website. When organisations quote for work, we state up front what we expect of them in terms of supplying drawings to us. This has been a major shift in the way we engage with our contractors, and RedEye has been instrumental in helping us to enforce higher level quality standards.”

One of the biggest opportunities Yarra Valley Water is now exploring as a result of using RedEye, is the cost savings it could make by creating standard drawings of assets such as its sewer and water stations.

An integrator working for the water provider recently reported that by not having standard drawings for its pumps, it was costing many thousands of dollars in extra design, rework and refit work for each site.  

“We have over 250 sewer and water sites. Using standard drawings and appropriate processes, has the potential for us to make substantial savings over the long term” said Mr Thompson.

“RedEye has been instrumental in helping us to enforce higher level quality standards.”

Yarra Valley Water continues to refine and extend its use of RedEye. The platform is driving cultural change through the organisation, by enabling conversations with suppliers around quality of work, and also procedural and workflow processes amongst its own staff.

Continued discussions with RedEye and its suppliers highlight opportunities to make additional cost savings. “RedEye really helps us to understand and demonstrate the value of our asset drawings and data, and is providing a strong foundation for our future digital initiatives,” he said.

“RedEye really helps us to understand and demonstrate the value of our asset drawings and data, and is providing a strong foundation for our future digital initiatives.”

Kenneth Thompson, 
Integration Services Specialist, Yarra Valley Water